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poliphilo The more you know about a thing the less you know.
Take the life and works of Nicholas Poussin; there are several experts in the field- and they disagree about almost everything it's possible to disagree about.
For instance there are quite a lot of paintings that may be by Poussin or by his colleague (and brother-in-law) Gaspard Duguet or by someone else entirely. Anthony Blunt (famous for other reasons) went to the lengths of creating a hypothetical artist called "The Master of the Silver Birches" to account for a group of landscapes which don't sit entirely comfortably in the oeuvre of any named painter. My man Christopher Wright thinks they probably represent Poussin's earliest attempts in the landscape genre but doesn't include them in his catalogue raisonne because he can't be sure.
What is true of the study of old master paintings is true of any other discipline you care to name.
How can you establish yourself as an expert if all you do is agree wholeheartedly with all the other experts? The expert who gets noticed is the one who swaggers into town looking for other experts to gun down.
Only so does the corpus of human knowledge get enlarged- or confused...
There are those, for example, who maintain that- actually- Einstein got it totally wrong...
"Settled science"? I laugh at the very idea.
Take the life and works of Nicholas Poussin; there are several experts in the field- and they disagree about almost everything it's possible to disagree about.
For instance there are quite a lot of paintings that may be by Poussin or by his colleague (and brother-in-law) Gaspard Duguet or by someone else entirely. Anthony Blunt (famous for other reasons) went to the lengths of creating a hypothetical artist called "The Master of the Silver Birches" to account for a group of landscapes which don't sit entirely comfortably in the oeuvre of any named painter. My man Christopher Wright thinks they probably represent Poussin's earliest attempts in the landscape genre but doesn't include them in his catalogue raisonne because he can't be sure.
What is true of the study of old master paintings is true of any other discipline you care to name.
How can you establish yourself as an expert if all you do is agree wholeheartedly with all the other experts? The expert who gets noticed is the one who swaggers into town looking for other experts to gun down.
Only so does the corpus of human knowledge get enlarged- or confused...
There are those, for example, who maintain that- actually- Einstein got it totally wrong...
"Settled science"? I laugh at the very idea.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-19 09:59 am (UTC)I have views on some things which are not always mainstream!
no subject
Date: 2023-03-19 01:55 pm (UTC)They usually turn out to be right, as well